Rants and raves about the mess of higher education in the United States.

Wednesday, November 7, 2018

Study: Conservatives Silencing Themselves On Campus

By Professor
Doom

On many campuses, the
political bias is massive, to the point that a student could easily
spend all four years on campus without hearing any “conservative” opinions,
much less meeting an actual conservative professor.

Trouble is, despite what our legacy media
keeps screaming at us, lots of people have conservative views. This includes
devout followers of Christian faiths (they exist, honest, despite the media
downplay in the face of the many, many, churches you can see with your own eyes
as you drive through any city), as well as people who dared to put an ‘R’ on
their political affiliation.

This group includes many of our young
adults, our kids heading off to college. How are they to act when they set foot
on a campus which considers them little more than knuckle-dragging monsters?

A political mismatch between professors and a large swath of
the student population has been widely documented. This mismatch is salient
within sociology, where left-leaning politics are mainstream and
institutionalized.

Yeah, no kidding. Much like my first link
in today’s post the mismatch is extreme. By “institutionalized” the authors are
referring to the fact that this mismatch cannot change: institutions have
rigged the game at the hiring level, so conservative faculty simply cannot get
into the institutions anymore.

Further, extant research indicates that this political
mismatch leads students outside of the left-leaning mainstream to perceive that
their professors are politically biased…

“leads…to perceive…politically biased”?
Seriously? This is not a perception,
it’s heavily documented fact. It’s
why anti-communists,
pro-heterosexuals,
and Christians
all receive very biased, hostile, treatment on campus, while the “not
conservative” people get basically a free pass on everything. I grant that this
particular bias isn’t the focus on the paper, so let’s move on:

In response, this study analyzes survey data from a diverse
sample of undergraduate students enrolled in sociology courses…

While sociology isn’t the most hard-core topic on campus, it does have
some things to say of relevance. Thus, most student are as obligated to take
sociology courses as they are mathematics courses; the sample here is
restricted to surveys of students in sociology courses, but that’s not much of
a bias. I took two such courses as an undergraduate, even though I was a
mathematics major.

Well, one would expect religiosity to affect perception, and it’s good
the paper acknowledged the professor bias in sociology but…”increased
skepticism towards science”? What? I remind the reader that many
“scientific” studies cannot be replicated, fundamentally violating the core concept of the scientific
method, and that, moreover, fields like sociology are particularly vulnerable
to having wide swaths of their beliefs not being replicable.

It’s…scary that the religious are being targeted for their skepticism
here, when seriously any rational person, aware of what’s currently going on,
should be skeptical of “the latest scientific findings.”

“Student learning is derailed when students
perceive a need to censor their beliefs or write on an exam what they think a
professor wants to hear. That is not a positive learning experience, or really
a learning experience at all,”

Hmm, the students “perceive” a need to
censor their beliefs? Surely the researchers know that when conservative
speakers come on campus, protesters threatening physical violence to such
speakers are quite common? To call this a “perception” is as inadequate as
saying humans “perceive a need” to inhale oxygen.

I can’t help but suspect the authors of
the study are dancing around an obvious problem here, as they consistently use
language to spin things to represent the problem is the students, and not the
atmosphere on many campuses.

…suggests
that professors could go out of their way to acknowledge politically divergent
theories during class, and to create a welcoming environment for diverse
viewpoints.

Well, that’s good advice. Too bad the
hiring committees make it certain professors holding “politically divergent”
theories aren’t allowed on campuses. It’s quite well known that the
“convergent” faculty aren’t going to address those other theories beyond
sneering condescension—otherwise they wouldn’t be converged, after all.